I’m in the midst of a move, down to the wire and still on the ticking clock so I'm posting a few takeaways (for now) on the two days of hearings in Congress this week on Facebook’s treatment of data and fealty to privacy rules -- and its respect for the First Amendment. If the hearings taught us anything, it's this: Congress is only discovering that we really don't know as much as we should about

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will face the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week to answer questions about the platform's practices with users' data. Apparently, he's concluded that testifying to Congress is the right thing to do when your company is under sustained fire over its customer data practices and how it chooses what users see on its platform. "The hearing — set before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the morning of April 11

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he would be "happy" to testify before Congress about Facebook's data privacy after revelations that it let third parties work with data on millions of its users for years, in potential violation of its own data privacy rules. He'll have his chance on the week of April 10. Reuters reports that Zuckerberg will be showing up to testify to the judiciary committee after Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) invited Zuckerberg

Facebook to world: Sorry. World to Facebook: Doesn't cut it. Facebook news has become a cottage industry of bad PR headlines since the revelation that the company’s leaky data-sharing policies also extended to user data that it let an academic researcher pull from the platform, which then reportedly let U.K. data analytics company Cambridge Analytica look it over and could reportedly involve some 50 million users. Not a lot of this is clear, other than

Where was the crack that an engineer reported to the construction crew working on the pedestrian bridge that collapsed at Miami's Florida International University? Now that emergency responders have removed the six victims who were trapped under the bridge when it fell, the investigation is moving into higher gear. Given the news that an engineer working on the project had reported a crack in the concrete prior to the collapse -- albeit noting it wasn't

After the 950-ton pedestrian bridge collapse at Miami's Florida International University Thursday, news reports are counting between six and seven fatalities so far and scores of injuries since the overpass walkway pancaked on the six-lane highway below. [caption id="attachment_1954" align="alignleft" width="300"] Aerial view, via AP, of the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Miami that collapsed on March 15.[/caption] The devastating scene soon after the collapse still speaks for itself. The bridge builders used

President Donald Trump is set to highlight an infrastructure plan among the topics he’s expected to bring up during his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 30th. In the meantime, sources are floating trial balloons in the political press detailing the early phases to gage support for alternative funding ideas. Politico, a reliable publication for how Democrats in Congress are thinking, is calling the $1 trillion, 10-year blueprint to rebuild America a

Ina Fried of Axios Login has an enviable and fun gig this week, covering the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where the latest hot tech is rolled out. It's good to read tech reporters who bring institutional memory to their coverage. They bring a much-needed cool to the hot type. “While the biggest tech breakthroughs probably won't show up at the CES,” Fried writes, “it’s a good place to see where the industry

I used to think that 2014 was the year that Artificial Intelligence crested in the public's awareness with the release of Amazon's voice-activated assistant, Alexa, and others like it. The cylinder with a little bit of backtalk and a lot of listening to its user's questions heralded the arrival of a form of AI, albeit in what is known as "narrow" AI – a set of decision-tree answers. But the Alexas of the world are

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the 37-year-old publisher of the New York Times, who just took the reins from his father Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., posted a New Year's Day op-ed about the urgency of his mission and challenges the news operation faces. "The business model that long supported the hard and expensive work of original reporting is eroding," he wrote in the front page piece, "forcing news organizations of all shapes and sizes to cut their reporting

More details on the Trump Administration's infrastructure plan came out just before Christmas. It’s setting up hopes that Congress will pass a bi-partisan infrastructure package in 2018. If one looks at the issue through the lens of which Democratic members of Congress represent a district that favors President Donald Trump, it’s easy to see how bi-partisanship over some kind of infrastructure package might just burst forth in the coming year. The 2018 mid-terms approach. Republicans

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year! For friends and family near and far. For veterans serving and away from family, for all workers on the job today, thank you and season's greetings. From the year-in-review department, which is busy compiling its best-of lists for a post before the year concludes, I've got to pluck out a belated shout-out to the Wreaths Across America foundation and its work honoring veterans during the

It's official: President Donald J. Trump put his signature on the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs bill Friday that represents $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for some 80 percent of taxpayers in the most sweeping overhaul of the tax code since 1986. He called the legislation a win for the middle class and a bill for jobs in remarks today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7keZTcdouoY Now, the construction industry and the administration are gearing up for an infrastructure package,

[Updated 12/19/17] Excessive speed details are emerging after the Amtrak 501 train derailment near Olympia, Washington Monday. And it's sparked a flurry of articles about whether Positive Train Control technology could have prevented the wreck. The derailment at an overpass trestle caused fatalities, though the number is unclear. Multiple injuries are reported from the accident. Amtrak said the train was carrying some 80 passengers and seven crew members. It was traveling at about 80 miles

[Updated 12/16/17] Two very big developments hit the news Thursday that tell us as much about the state of media, entertainment, news and culture as they do the future of media and society. For one, Walt Disney's $52.4-billion stock deal to buy a major portion of 21st Century Fox is all about the future of content delivery via video streaming. And second, the Federal Communications Commission's 3-2 vote (along party lines) to roll back Depression-era

The latest on the would-be suicide bomber who reportedly botched his attempted terror attack: Per the NYPD: UPDATE: Akayed Ullah, the suspect arrested in yesterday’s terror attack in NYC, has been charged with the following: • Criminal Possession of a Weapon • Support Act of Terrorism • Making Terroristic Threat From ABCSeven.com: The charging document said law enforcement personnel found a 9-volt battery inside Ullah's pants pocket, wires connected to the battery running under his

All eyes on are on Congress this week as House and Senate conference committees hammer out differences in their Tax Reform/Tax Cut bills and aim to pass historic legislation by the end of the year. President Donald Trump is reportedly planning a speech on Wednesday about the tax cut legislation, Bloomberg reports. This is a president making the case to the American people about the need to modernize the tax code and level the playing

Forecasters say the Santa Ana wind event whipping up the destructive blazes that leveled homes, highways and major swaths of Southern California infrastructure is the strongest of its kind this year. President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency in the region as a result of the fires. The declaration will free up federal assistance to "supplement State, tribal, and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from wildfires beginning on December 4, 2017,

Wildfires raging in southern California have destroyed hundreds of homes; others in the Bel-Air area are reportedly ablaze. The morning commute looked like a scene from a disaster movie. L.A. Times: "The fire also caused massive gridlock along one of the city’s most congested commuter corridors. Caltrans announced the full closure of the 405 Freeway between the 101 and 10 Freeways. It has also closed all onramps onto the 405." The Los Angeles Police Department has

[Updated]: The current glut in natural gas and lowered prices for the commodity is driving a South African energy firm to shutter plans for a Liquified Natural Gas plant in Louisiana worth up to $14 billion. Industry watchers and locals took the news in stride. The region is booming in LNG plants and the action is in delivering it to overseas markets. European markets are a key target, which helps introduce some competition to Russian

[Updates prior version]: Meredith Corporation made its acquisition of Time, Inc., official Monday, in a deal valued at about $2.8 billion. It includes $650 million in preferred equity commitment from Koch Equity Development (KED), the finance arm of Charles G. and David H. Koch. The boards of directors of Meredith and Time Inc. have approved the $18.50 per- share in an all-cash transaction. The deal caps the end of an era, as the WSJ’s nut

The Federal Communications Commission made its plans to undo the Obama-era "Net Neutrality" rules official Tuesday, saying it will roll back the regulations that govern how internet service providers price and deliver their services. The vote is scheduled for the FCC's Open Meeting on Dec. 14th and is expected to prevail along party lines with three Republican commissioners voting yes and two Democrats voting no. Depending on where you stand on the rules, this is

AT&T and the Department of Justice are headed to federal court over antitrust issues with its Time Warner merger. The stakes look as high as 1984, when the DoJ won its antitrust case and broke up Ma Bell. Now the antitrust civil suit is over the AT&T/DirectTV-Time Warner merger, valued lately between $85 billion to $108 billion, which the DoJ's civil antitrust lawsuit says would hurt competition and result in higher prices and less innovation for millions

[Updated 11/19/17] This "About New York" column by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times about the woeful experience that the New York City subway is these days brought back to mind all those $20 cab rides I paid for with increasing frequency to get to work without dealing with the overcrowding underground and still loving my fellow humans. That was before Uber or Lyft. It started to add up before I finally moved out of

Shell Chemicals has broken ground on a $6-billion ethane cracker plant in Potter Township in Pennsylvania's Beaver County north of Pittsburgh, which is expected to create about 6,000 construction jobs and some 600 permanent ones when it goes online. It's a big new chapter in the state's fracking boom story. The plans include the construction of a 250-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, which will produce electricity and steam to run the cracker plant, according to local publication

The New York Thruway's budget is holding the line on toll hikes in its 2018 budget. The Times Herald-Record, reporting from Albany on the authority, says: "The New York State Thruway Authority adopted a 2018 budget Monday that keeps tolls flat for the eighth consecutive year. The $1.56 billion budget, a 2.7 percent increase over 2017, includes $342.6 million in operating expenses and $863.3 million in capital expenses, with $458.8 million going toward the new

It's hard to ignore the comments about social media coming from one of the founders of Facebook, Sean Parker, in a recent interview with Axios's Mike Allen. He's become a "conscientious objector" about social media. We'll take that to mean he deploys less of it on a daily basis because of how addictive it is. For parents worried about their kids getting too "high" off dopamine hits to their brains with each FB like and

California's wildfires, day eight: More than 40,000 people are out of their homes, reportedly down from 100,000; the death toll is at 41, mostly in Sonoma and Napa Counties. My brother and sister in-law live in Mendocino County. Other areas just seven miles north of Ukiah where they live are flattened, out of the 200,000 acres of land the fires have scorched as approximately 11,000 firefighters battle the siege. But they are nervous, humbled at

[Updated 10/14/17] California's wildfires have reportedly claimed 36 lives in Napa and Sonoma County's wine country after laying waste to homes, businesses and utilities with a swift and brutal devastation in what is becoming annus horribilis for major swaths of the region's and nation's infrastructure from natural disasters. Some 3,500 businesses and homes went up in flames since the fires broke out on Sunday and hundreds are still missing. "It's an extremely stressful and challenging time," said Office

Nicholas Carr has done it again. The best-selling author and leading light chronicling technology and digital media's impact on our way of life, our way of thinking—our brain function even—published a thought piece in the Saturday WSJ that compiles a comprehensive array of research about smartphones' effect on our brains. Entitled, “How Smartphones Hijack our Minds,” the piece's premise is that, as the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens. It is a

The news this week that AOL would be ending its Instant Messaging service after a 20-year run deserves a comment or two on its cultural impact during its heyday in the late 90s and early aughts. In a post on Tumblr this week, Michael Albers, VP of communications product at Oath, presumably speaking on behalf of AOL, wrote that the service would cease on Dec. 15th of this year: AIM tapped into new digital technologies

Editors in one of the newsrooms I worked in often joked that we should sound a warning alarm when reporters start to do math. This was our way of poking fun at ourselves and a profession populated by liberal arts majors who are more comfortable with words than working with numbers. But plenty of good journos committed to getting the math right admit what they don't know and figure it out, often with the help

President Donald Trump's comments Tuesday about Puerto Rico's $72-billion debt being "wiped out" sent bond markets into a tizzy Wednesday, and, in the process, got the issue of the hurricane-ravaged island's finances back into the discussion as it rebuilds. (And reminded us former business journalists that psychology still drives market shifts, and bond markets are a jittery lot.) The comments came during the President and First Lady's tour of Puerto Rico Tuesday as the island

[Updated to reflect casualties and injured] This story doesn't easily slot into any topics that SL2R blog covers, but when the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history happens in Las Vegas, which it did late Sunday during a country music festival, with 59 confirmed dead so far and about 527 injured, we must post. Police have identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, 64, who was reportedly shooting from the 32nd floor window of the Mandalay

[UPDATED 10/1] After documenting the scale of the infrastructure damage to Southeast Texas and Florida from hurricanes Harvey and Irma, respectively, as a way to keep up with the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, I've been compiling notes on the situation facing Puerto Rico as residents work through the day-to-day of coping with an island devastated by the two major hurricanes in a short time span. Hurricane Maria's damage to Puerto Rico is in another class

A week after Mexico City's magnitude 7.1 earthquake, with the heartbreaking search and rescue for children in a school whose roof pancaked, and over 326 people dead from the quake, the ripples from the hit in the earthquake-prone region are not over. The questions now in front of city officials is whether Mexico's aggressive building codes are only good on paper or if the buddy-buddy system of approvals -- which plagues building inspections around the

[UPDATED SEPT. 22] Puerto Rico is an island without electricity today after Hurricane Maria pummeled the U.S. territory on Wednesday when the Category 4 storm made landfall. The devastation is massive. The U.S. Virgin Islands also sustained damage from just a glancing blow as Hurricane Maria swept in. The scale of destruction is only starting to reveal itself. Now comes word that damage to the Guajataca Dam may mean some 70,000 residents who live nearby have

Amazing doesn't quite sum up the sheer power of Hurricane Irma, as the world watches the former Category 5 hurricane continue wreaking its destruction in the southeast after slamming into Florida twice as a Category 4 hurricane Sunday. To sum it up, via CBSNews.com: The monster hurricane that hit the Florida Keys on Sunday as a Category 4 storm was downgraded to tropical storm status as it finally pushed its way out of the state

After watching Hurricane Harvey's devastation in southeast Texas last week, we thought we'd seen a storm to top all storms for years to come. The initial damage estimates from Harvey's hit on greater Houston and parts of Louisiana are as high as $180 billion and could out do Katrina's damage tab. We were wrong. Hurricane Irma, category 5, 175 mph winds, is breaking all records as it barrels to Florida and the southeast, after leaving

The Tappan Zee bridge project in New York's Westchester County is scheduled to open its westbound lane to traffic on Friday, Aug. 25th, according to the New York Thruway, the authority overseeing the project. And they're going to name the new bridge after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's father. It's a stunning project to behold and a big milestone. At $4 billion, it's a big price tag with roughly $400 million still unfunded, give or

At 61 stories high, the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco now dominates the city's skyline. And not all San Franciscans are happy about it. One local architecture critic calls it a building that belongs in New York or even Chicago. It wasn't a compliment. But it should be. New York could show us a few things about the state of building tall. And it's skinnier than ever. The AP reports, via the Press Democrat, that

Electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group, a major product supplier to Apple, Microsoft and Intel, made news this week when it announced a $10 billion expansion of its operations in southeastern Wisconsin to make flat-panel (LCD) displays and other products. The six-year project should create some 10,000 construction jobs, Foxconn said, 3,000 permanent jobs when the plant opens and estimates ranging from 10,000 to 22,000 jobs that support the facility, depending on how you add up

The U.S. construction industry's current expansion "still has legs" and is looking at 3% overall growth in 2017 — and 5% if you take out the more volatile sectors, says Dodge Data & Analytics chief economist Robert Murray. But a "slight tempering" has crept into the construction data firm's research, which is another way of saying uncertainty coming out of Washington, D.C. has found its way into its forecasts for the rest of the year. For

[Updated 7/11/17]: A 2,000-member newspaper alliance is asking Congress for a pass on antitrust laws so it can engage in a kind of collusion to counter the dominance of the Google News/Facebook platform duopoly. The newspapers' ask is thus: "The objective is to permit publishers to have concrete discussions with the two dominant distributors of online news content, Google and Facebook, on business model solutions to secure the long-term availability of local journalism produced by

Taking in President Donald Trump's speech in Poland on Thursday, I was reminded of my early childhood years in Germany where my father, a military pilot, was stationed during the height of the Cold War (back when it was West Germany). In 1968, amid the so-called Prague Spring movement for more democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia, which threatened the Soviet Union's communist rule of the country, some 200,000 Soviet bloc troops marched in and crushed the

Of all the retrospectives in the tech press this week about the iPhone's decade of cultural impact 10 years after its launch on June 29, and the backstory of how they got to launch, the WSJ's video of three former Apple executives stands out for me. The pivotal moments the three Apple executives describe in their stories of the development of the touch-screen format and other iPhone features puts you in the vibe of the

It's hard to keep up with the troubles at CNN these days, what with a failed hit piece against an associate of President Trump, which it had to retract (or face potential legal action), that led to resignations of three journalists from the newsroom who were involved with the fiasco. And now comes the release of an undercover video by conservative activist James O'Keefe of Project Veritas that catches a CNN producer saying the network

Germany is legendary for its apprenticeship and trade school programs in partnership with industry that confer high-level skill-sets on graduates and major earning power in manufacturing and skilled trades. For too many years, vocational-technical training schools in the U.S. did not carry the same cachet or earning power compared to a college degree, or so the conventional wisdom went at the time. But that's changing. The Trump Administration made last week a focus on Workforce

Amazon the everything/media/grocery/potentially collaboration store made waves today when it announced a $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc., which roiled the stocks of retailers who sell groceries, such as Wal-Mart and grocery chains such as Kroger. If Amazon the former bookseller was struggling to gain a foothold in the grocery business, given that most people tend to buy their food in person instead of online, this changes everything. So far afield is Amazon

President Trump closed out his administration's Infrastructure Week with a speech at the Department of Transportation that had all the elements of a solid event: Great speech-writing, a bi-partisan issue in the need to fix crumbling infrastructure around the USA, and effective visuals when the president held up thick binders of documents that builders generate -- at $24,000 per page in one case, just to get the go-ahead to build. One flowchart on display at

The Trump Administration is reportedly putting the President's Bully Pulpit to work this week with a series of announcements and tours focusing on critical infrastructure issues across the United States. First up, reports the Washington Post, will be a spotlight on the Next-Gen efforts by the Federal Aviation Administration, and a plan to privatize the nation's air traffic control system. The president has invited executives from major airlines to join him as he kicks off

To watch the fascinating video of a drone swarm released by the Department of Defense this week is to see life not only imitate science-fiction movies, but also show us how far-ahead in real-life these robotic swarms are. (Article about the successful testing of them in January is here.) Beyond the drone-delivery phenomenon pushed by Amazon and others, or the Federal Aviation Administration's attempts to come up with rules for hobbyist drones without a court

FMI, a management consulting and investment banking firm focused on engineering and construction, infrastructure and the built environment. has come out with its forecast for non-residential construction for 2017 and it dovetails with other forecasts at about 6% growth overall. ConstructionPros.com has a summary: Highway and Street – Highway and street construction increased just 1% in 2016 to $91.0 billion. FMI forecasts 3% growth for 2017 and another 4% in 2018. The Fixing America’s Surface

I was thrilled to have been invited to construction data firm Dodge Data & Analytics' Construction Outlook update in New York City recently. Dodge prepared the update to reflect the priorities, outlook and improved business sentiment under the Trump Administration's America First agenda and Infrastructure and Public Works as part of that focus on rebuilding America's wealth. It expects to distribute to clients later this week. Key takeaways by Robert Murray, chief economist of the

Updated: E&ENews is reporting of revived bi-partisan efforts in the House to introduce new bills to fund infrastructure spending. "Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced legislation to raise the gas tax by around a penny a year. The bill, H.R. 1664, would generate around $500 billion to rebuild U.S. roads, bridges and transit systems through 2030. "DeFazio said he had shared the proposal with D.J. Gribbin, who

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About SLP Blog

Parsing 'The Narratives'

Business, technology and policy journalist, editorial ops veteran and manager type who studies the connective tissue of our lives: the built environment, technology's impact and the way media crafts "the narrative." Occasionally, it results in a blog post here.

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Horrifying fire at the 850-year-old Notre Dame. French President Macron says will rebuild the cathedral after they struggled to get water on the scaffold from renovation. A reminder of the emotional connection we have in architecture such as #NotreDame. https://t.co/NUvwpV5xRb

#ICYMI: Europe Adopts Tough New Online Copyright Rules Over Tech Industry Protests "the new law could require Google to obtain new licenses from publishers. After Spain passed a similar law, Google shut down Google News in the country." #digitalmedia https://t.co/VDjlyAXAM8

"...the new law could require Google to obtain new licenses from publishers. After Spain passed a similar law, Google shut down Google News in the country." #digitalmedia Europe Adopts Tough New Online Copyright Rules Over Tech Industry Protests https://t.co/VDjlyAXAM8

Quote to ponder in this piece by @ZDNet on the #InternetOfThings driving the "4th Industrial Revolution": system control in Critical Infrastructure Industries (CII) (water, electricity); massive data to analyze.#IoT #5G #criticalinfrastructure https://t.co/soKA4SZR2B